Perplexity AI adds a ‘conversational’ shopping assistant to help you find what to buy: here's how it works

Soon after OpenAI launched its shopping research feature, Perplexity has also brought in a dedicated AI shopping assitant which uses natural language prompts to provide personalized product recommendations to the users. Perplexity says its conversational search knows about the history of users, learns what matters about them and ‘conversational search’

“Our approach to shopping represents how we think about AI assistants across every feature we build, whether browsing, managing email, or working on tasks in the background. AI assistants are at their best when they scale users, rather than replace them. They understand intent, remember preferences, and act as extensions of how users would approach a task on their own.” the company said in a blogpost

The new conversational search is already rolling otu to users on desktop and web and access to Perplexity iOS and Android app will be rolled out in the coming weeks, the company says. The shopping experience, however, is currently limited to the United States.

Moreover, users don't need to use specific keywords while searching for a product and can search on Perplexity using natural language queries. For instance, when a user asks Perplexity “What’s the best winter jacket if I live in San Francisco and take a ferry to work?”. The company says it AI will look into the user's history to search for their commute route and give a result based on that.

The AI startup also noted that when users ask follow up questions like “What about boots?”, it's AI can maintain the same context and give suggestions based on that.

“Perplexity remembers your past searches and learns your patterns, so when you ask about a desk lamp today, it finds options that match your mid-century modern aesthetic, not what advertisers want to sell first.” the company explained in its blogpost.

Perplexity has parntered with PayPal to process the payment for the order. The company says that this partnership will ‘retailers stay at the center of the transaction as the merchant of record’ and provide them with full visibility into who their customer is. It also noted that customers who go through the conversational, personalized shopping experience have ‘significantly higher intention to purchase’